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10/25/2010 10:38 AM

Texas Bakery First to Use Ecoblock Heat Capture

SustainableBusiness.com News

A bread and cracker manufacturer in Texas is opening a new commercial bakery that captures waste heat and emissions from its ovens, reducing its operating costs and its environmental impact.

The new Doctor Kracker bakery in Plano is the first in the nation to use a German technology called Ecoblock, which captures excess heat to generate hot water and run part of the air conditioning and water chilling systems. As a result, the new bakery is expected to save about 15% in electricity usage.

The Ecoblock system also filters carbon dioxide (CO2), ozone and other particulates from the oven exhaust.

Carbon dioxide is a principal byproduct of baking bread and is a key factor in helping bread get its spongy texture from yeast, converting glucose into equal parts of ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. The familiar smell of bread baking is the oxidation of the ethyl alcohol as these gases are released during heating.

The bakery’s exhaust returns to the environment as clean as the air that was introduced into the bakery, according to a Doctor Kracker release.